Artists in Residence

With her distinctive attention to being a female artist, Mahaut Harley Leca feels the need to translate both individual and multiple concerns about women’s role in society. Her endless investigation of the ‘body’ led her to examine the superficial interpretation of the female body in fashion advertising. Through the female gaze, the ‘body’ is depicted as the origin of language, the result of inner emotions and a biographical revelation of her psychic state. By creating out of focus, deconstructed works she is recreating the original, and giving a new meaning to the ready-made. What happened in the past is not gone but transformed into the modern.

This endless process of reassembling and reconstructing the damaged reflects the ancient Japanese philosophy of embracing the damaged, Wabi Sabi, that resolves in breaking traditional ideals of imperfection where the pristine is less beautiful than the imperfect. The appropriation of ready-made imagery and found elements is translated into faceless compositions of twisted legs and arms resulting in a multiplied landscape of dismembered limbs. With this in mind and the use of grisaille and absence of colour she is familiarizing the uncomfortable into her ideal of aesthetic to later give birth to unique artworks which of whom one can appreciate the singular new beauty.